MUMBAI: It is one of the first English news channels to have started in India with big names such as Prannoy Roy, Barkha Dutt, Vikram Chandra, among many others. Now, it also has the record of being the first Indian company to cross a million followers on Twitter, which was confirmed by Twitter India as well. At the time of writing this piece @ndtv had 1,027,616 followers. It has left its competitors far behind in the race for the presence on Twitter with Times Now having 136, 684; CNN-IBN having 434,152 and Headlines Today with 37,849 followers.

The first seeds of Twitter were sown in May 2009 and it was on 5 July 2013 that the million followers mark was crossed. That is just in a matter of four years; NDTV turned a Twitter-millionaire.

So what is the secret behind the successful twitter handle of NDTV? "Nothing technical or campaign-like", says NDTV Convergence CTO Kawaljit Singh Bedi. "There is no dedicated social media team that handles twitter for NDTV. Web editors make sure news goes out under 140 characters. During the day, the editors handle the handle while in the wee hours of the night a machine ensures that news flash items are also tweeted automatically."

An average of 100 tweets are sent out daily, which is significantly lower than other English news channels, according to Bedi. Without spamming walls they just tweet about significant happenings. This could be one reason for the rising graph of followers for NDTV?s Twitter page. However, the main reason he attributes to it is their desire to ?put news out first? and not look at increasing followers. "We are a news provider and we will hold information till we know that it is right," says Bedi.

"We have always believed that we are in the content business and we have to get the content to our viewers in any and every way," says NDTV Group CEO Vikram Chandra. According to Twitter Counter, an application to track Twitter growth of individual handles, in the last three months the followers of NDTV increased by 1441 per day on average. A sampling of 1.2 million twitter users placed NDTV at a 1325 rank worldwide.

Surprisingly, NDTV has stopped audience and viewer interaction on twitter drastically as compared to earlier. Now, questions on Twitter are restricted to situations when a reporter is unable to reach the an incident site on time. Opinion related questions have all been shifted to the second screen section on NDTV?s mobile application. "People who come on Twitter need not necessarily interact, they may just be coming in search of information," says Bedi. Yet, it brings a great deal of traffic to its Twitter handle.

NDTV doesn?t get into the fray of following trends and making a story out of these unless the story merits it or it has been missed out totally. Putting out news based on the merit of the news- as Bedi puts it. The kind of news tweeted is completely based on NDTV?s editorial guidelines. When everyone is fervently trying to increase their followers? base, NDTV does it with ease.

Analytics regarding the performance on Twitter are restricted to get insights into where they might be failing rather than where they made a lot of buzz on the social media. "We go beyond targeting India and are also retweeted by many international accounts as well," adds and ecstatic Bedi. Being humble about the achievement, Bedi says "It is just a number for us to let people know we are a good account."

NEW DELHI: The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) has been asked to continue for the present, the existing limits of FDI caps and entry routes in the Print and Broadcasting Sectors may continue.

I&B Ministry has said status quo in the interim be maintained as prescribed in the consolidated FDI Policy 2013.

Meanwhile, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry has asked the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Press Council of India for their views on revising the limits of foreign direct investment in the broadcasting and print media respectively.

The request has been made in response to the draft consultation paper of the Finance Ministry on FDI Caps in the Print and Broadcasting Sector.

Earlier, on receipt of the draft consultation paper on FDI Caps, the Ministry undertook comprehensive consultations with stakeholders in the Print and Broadcasting Sectors to elicit their views on the issues concerned. During the consultations, divergent views emerged leading to the issues remaining inconclusive. It may be pointed out that while the Indian Newspaper Society (INS) have sought additional time to give their comments, the News Broadcasters Association (NBA), has not furnished their comments till date. In view of the given position, the Ministry has felt that the matter be referred to TRAI and PCI for seeking their comments.

It may also be pointed out that TRAI being the regulator for the Broadcasting and Cable Services needs to be consulted as in the past on account of the likely impact of the proposal is expected to have on the Broadcasting Sector as a whole. On 20 September 2012, the foreign investment limits of various segments in broadcasting sector were revised based on TRAI recommendations. TRAI had gone through the due process of consultations with the stakeholders before it made its recommendations.

MUMBAI: James Franco is the latest celeb to be put in the cross hairs of a Comedy Central roast.

he 127 Hours star recently announced via Instagram video that he?ll be roasted on the cabler. The roast will be taped in August in Los Angeles, and telecast on Comedy Central on Labor Day.

"If only James Franco was a more successful, multi-hyphenated, incessant creative risk taker in different media, he?d be the perfect person to roast. Oh well? I suppose we?ll just have to make do," said Kent Alterman, president of Content Development & Original Programming at the net.

Franco added: "I?ve dreamed about this roast for as long as I can remember."

"Comedy Central Roast of James Franco" will be exec produced by Miles Levy and Joel Gallen from Tenth Planet Prods, the team behind Comedy Central?s roasts of Charlie Sheen, William Shatner and Donald Trump.

MUMBAI: New IPTV entrants are winning over subscribers from established pay-TV providers, particularly in Brazil and Russia, says Infonetics Research.

Infonetics Research released excerpts from its new Pay TV Subscriber Database, which tracks the digital and analogue cable pay-TV, satellite pay-TV and telco IPTV subscribers of more than 140 providers around the world.

The research points to Russia?s Rostelecom, Brazil?s GVT and Dutch provider KPN as notable new players that are posing a challenge to incumbents. In one year, KPN saw a jump of 77 per cent in IPTV subscribers. GVT saw a 62 per cent increase, and Rostelecom a 42 per cent increase. Deutsche Telekom?s Eastern European divisions are also gaining IPTV subscribers at a healthy rate, according to Infonetics.

China Telecom is the world leader in telco IPTV subscribers, with 20.5 million subs as of the fourth quarter of 2012. Globally, the top five cable pay-TV providers by subscribers are Comcast, Jiangsu Cable TV, Guangdong Cable TV, Shandong Cable TV and Sichuan Cable TV. DirecTV in the U.S. is number one in satellite pay-TV subscribers, followed by DISH Network, British Sky Broadcasting and DirecTV Latin America; the operators together accounted for 55 million subscribers in Q4 2012.

"We continue to see strong growth among telco IPTV upstarts, like Rostelecom in Russia, GVT in Brazil, KPN in the Netherlands and providers in Eastern Europe where competition for new pay-TV subscribers is particularly fierce," said Infonetics Research principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV Jeff Heynen.

"Our Pay TV Database gets the point across that telcos in both emerging and mature markets can do well, even when the market is saturated with cable and satellite providers."

MUMBAI: The CableU television research company has signed an expanded agreement with Nielsen that broadens the scope and value of the company?s subscription-based offering and results in a name change to RatingsIntel.

The company will be operating as RatingsIntel.com starting 9 July. The service will include all CableU research, featuring a searchable archive of more than 4,000 ratings research reports from 2006 onward. It will transition from monthly reports to daily reports on the rating stories from all Nielsen-reported networks. The daily reports include analysis, ratings data and graphs to illustrate ratings stories.

"We?re excited. Our mission is simply stated: Put ratings into context for busy media professionals and those with a financial stake in the industry," said Reess Kennedy, current CableU partner who will take over as chief executive of the company from CableU founder Gary Lico, who will stay on as an advisor and minority partner.

NEW DELHI: The Lahore High Court has said it is convinced that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) is not interested in drafting a mechanism that could open (unblock) YouTube in Pakistan.

Even in the ninth hearing of ?Pakistan Internet Freedom? (Bytes for All Vs Federation of Pakistan), the stakeholders involved in this case were not completely present.

The representative of Google, whom the court had directed to appear in its last hearing, did not come to throw light on the issue of blasphemous content on YouTube and possible measures to remove it.

The Deputy Attorney General informed the court that Google did not respond to the request and seemingly had no interest in this case.

Bytes for All, the petitioner, informed the court that PTA was misleading the court and that it had the mechanism to filter the unwanted blasphemous and anti-social content on internet. "While PTA has the technical capacity to block individual URLs to keep the rest of the platform accessible, they had been denying their ability to do so," the petitioner argued.

A filtering solution is already in practice at Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) which hired the technology from a Canadian firm Netsweeper.

According to the petitioner, the Netsweeper technology is being implemented in Pakistan on PTCL for purposes of political and social filtering, including websites of secessionist movements, sensitive religious topics and independent media.

Several times, the Pakistan government and its regulatory bodies have announced that they lack a technical capability to block specific URLs in Pakistan and for that they require a filtering software. Other than this, government representatives have been demanding that Google open its office in Pakistan so that legal affairs could be controlled in a better way. Last month, Peshawar High Court, while hearing a similar case, had directed government to make Google open its office in Pakistan.

An official of the ISP while commenting on the situation said, "It is very easy to provide complete access to YouTube archive and filter the unwanted content at the same time. If government is seriously willing to resolve the issue, ISPs can install the filtering software on their end. This will ensure filtered access to entire YouTube."

Earlier, the government formed a four member committee for analysing 8 million URLs to ensure that no blasphemous content existed. "The government is just trying to save the PTCL from making an investment into buying a filtration solution. Based on its 200 giga bits traffic, it will need to invest some USD 20 million whereas, for a smaller ISP the cost is USD 0.1 million," official sources said.

Justice Mansoor Ali Shah of Lahore High Court has listed the matter for 25 July.